What is Poetry?

1. What is Poetry? If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing. The poet puts language in danger. --Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

2. Poetry Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines, For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough )they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

3. Poetry Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

4. Poetry [Poetry] is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavors to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process. . . . Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose--a train which delivers you at a destination. --T. E. Hulme Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

5. Poetry A poem is not so much heard as overheard. --John Stuart Mill Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

6. Poetry I don't believe in a tame poetry. When poetry hears its own name, it runs, flies, swims off for fear of its own life. You can bet your boots on that. Jean Cocteau said a poet rarely bothers about poetry. Does a gardener perfume his roses? --Frank Stanford Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

7. Poetry [Poetry] gives knowledge of the chaos and confusion of the world by imposing order upon it which leaves it still the chaos and confusion which it really is. --Archibald MacLeish Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

8. Poetry Poetry is indispensable—if I only knew what for. --Jean Cocteau Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens